As we experience and manipulate time—be it as boredom or impatience—it becomes an object: something materialized and social, something that affects perception, or something that may motivate reconsideration and change. The editors and contributors to this important new book, Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality, have provided a diverse collection of ethnographic studies and theoretical explorations of youth experiencing time in a variety of contemporary socio-cultural settings.

 

The essays in this volume focus on time as an external and often troubling factor in young people’s lives, and shows how emotional unrest and violence but also creativity and hope are responses to troubling times. The chapters discuss notions of time and its and its “objectification” in diverse locales including the Georgian Republic, Brazil, Denmark and Uganda.

 

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the essays in Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality use youth as a prism to understand time and its subjective experience. 

In the series Global Youth, edited by Craig Jeffrey and Jane Dyson

Anne Line Dalsgaard is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark, and author of Matters of Life and Longing: Female Sterilization in Northeast Brazil.

Martin Demant Frederiksen is External Lecturer in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and author of Young Men, Time, and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia (Temple).

Susanne Højlund is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark, and author of Barndomskonstruktioner. På feltarbejde i skole, sygehus og SFO(Childhood Constructions).

Lotte Meinert is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark, and author of Hopes in Friction: Schooling, Health and Everyday Life in Uganda.